THE
GIRL ON THE TRAIN
Based on the best-selling thriller by
Paula Hawkins, which currently floods the bookstores, The Girl on the Train should command a ready-made audience. The
book also employs a most cinematic structure, which should make it smoothly
adaptable. It uses multiple narrators
and points of view, jumps backward and forward in time, and a unifying symbol,
the commuter train that runs through all the action, unites the characters, and
provides both symbol and basis for the central situation. Even the transplantation from England to
America presents no particular problems for the script.
A depressed, alcoholic young woman
named Rachel (Emily Blunt), who’s lost her job because of her drinking, still
rides the train from Westchester to Manhattan every day, mostly because she
doesn’t know what else to do with her sad life.
The train passes near her former house, where her ex-husband lives with
his new wife and baby daughter, and by another, where she observes an
attractive, loving couple, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans). Those people and their lives represent all
that she has lost and cannot ever regain, an apparent happiness that she will
never know.
Through flashbacks and cuts from one
couple to another, as well as through Rachel’s point of view, the picture
unfolds several stories, which frequently differ from Rachel’s interpretation
of people and events. Because of her
often inebriated condition, her emotional fragility from her divorce, her fantasies
about the perfect couple she sees every day, her confused memory, she becomes
the perfect example of an unreliable narrator.
When Megan disappears, the police investigate and question Rachel about
her vague reports of seeing the missing woman getting into a car during one of
her periods of drunkenness; as her story grows more confusing she involves
Scott, her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), and his wife Anna (Rebecca
Ferguson).
As the various narrative threads and
characters intertwine, a solution to the mystery begins to emerge and along
with it, revelations of a truth that none of the characters previously
understood. The apparent reality
dissolves under Rachel’s increasing comprehension of what actually happened and
who abducted Megan. Those revelations in
effect solve the mystery but also suggest a kind of shared guilt—all of the
people bear a painful burden from their respective pasts, which influences
their actions and their plight and leads to the tragedy in the film.
The multiple points of view maintain
the sense of the difference between appearance and reality, and lend some
energy to a regrettably uneven narrative pace.
The director, Tate Taylor, employs a great many tight close-ups of characters’
faces, a technique that may initially suit the style and content of the film,
but gradually grows both visually and thematically overstated and rather
wearying. He also tends to repeat shots
and scenes beyond a kind of necessary limit, so the movie often seems to be
showing the same people and action over and over.
Beneath
the surface of its mystery, The Girl on
the Train ultimately fits right into the contemporary version of that old
standby, the chick flick. Beyond its
focus on the major characters, the three connected women, it shows that the
male characters are either inadequate weaklings or cruel betrayers. Despite their victimization, the women
essentially triumph, even in a final bloody act of violence, but the picture is
honest enough to show that their victories create a certain ambiguity; nobody
finally earns genuine happiness or even satisfaction, and several lives, if not
ruined, have been drastically altered.
In a sense, the movie suggests that everyone hides some secret, that everyone
is guilty of something.
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